The ten chapters in this book stretch and challenge current canonical configurations of modernism in two key ways: by considering the centrality of black artists, writers, and intellectuals as key ...
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The ten chapters in this book stretch and challenge current canonical configurations of modernism in two key ways: by considering the centrality of black artists, writers, and intellectuals as key actors and core presences in the development of a modernist avant-garde; and by interrogating ‘blackness’ as an aesthetic and political category at critical moments during the twentieth century. The book explores the term ‘Afromodernisms’ and addresses together the cognate fields of modernism and the black Atlantic.Less

Afromodernisms : Paris, Harlem and the Avant-Garde

Published in print: 2013-02-06

The ten chapters in this book stretch and challenge current canonical configurations of modernism in two key ways: by considering the centrality of black artists, writers, and intellectuals as key actors and core presences in the development of a modernist avant-garde; and by interrogating ‘blackness’ as an aesthetic and political category at critical moments during the twentieth century. The book explores the term ‘Afromodernisms’ and addresses together the cognate fields of modernism and the black Atlantic.

This study takes as its point of departure an essential premise: that the widespread phenomenon of expatriation in American modernism is less a flight from the homeland than a dialectical return to ...
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This study takes as its point of departure an essential premise: that the widespread phenomenon of expatriation in American modernism is less a flight from the homeland than a dialectical return to it, but one which renders uncanny all tropes of familiarity and immediacy that ‘fatherlands’ and ‘mother tongues’ are traditionally seen as providing. In this framework, similarly totalising notions of cultural authenticity are seen to govern both exoticist mystification and ‘nativist’ obsessions with the purity of the ‘mother tongue.’ At the same time, cosmopolitanism, translation and multilingualism become often eroticised tropes of violation of this model, and in consequence, simultaneously courted and abhorred, in a movement which, if crystallised in expatriate modernism, continued to make its presence felt beyond. Beginning with the late work of Henry James, this book goes on to examine at length Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, to conclude with the uncanny regionalism of mid-century San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer, and the deterritorialised aesthetic of his peer, John Ashbery. Through an emphasis on modernism as a space of generalized interference, the practice and trope of translation emerges as central to all of the writers concerned, while the book remains in constant dialogue with key recent works on transnationalism, transatlanticism and modernism.Less

American Modernism's Expatriate Scene : The Labour of Translation

Daniel Katz

Published in print: 2007-08-01

This study takes as its point of departure an essential premise: that the widespread phenomenon of expatriation in American modernism is less a flight from the homeland than a dialectical return to it, but one which renders uncanny all tropes of familiarity and immediacy that ‘fatherlands’ and ‘mother tongues’ are traditionally seen as providing. In this framework, similarly totalising notions of cultural authenticity are seen to govern both exoticist mystification and ‘nativist’ obsessions with the purity of the ‘mother tongue.’ At the same time, cosmopolitanism, translation and multilingualism become often eroticised tropes of violation of this model, and in consequence, simultaneously courted and abhorred, in a movement which, if crystallised in expatriate modernism, continued to make its presence felt beyond. Beginning with the late work of Henry James, this book goes on to examine at length Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, to conclude with the uncanny regionalism of mid-century San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer, and the deterritorialised aesthetic of his peer, John Ashbery. Through an emphasis on modernism as a space of generalized interference, the practice and trope of translation emerges as central to all of the writers concerned, while the book remains in constant dialogue with key recent works on transnationalism, transatlanticism and modernism.

This book examines the way American writers present the effects of trauma in their work. Trauma has become an important and influential paradigm for reading contemporary American literature. Too ...
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This book examines the way American writers present the effects of trauma in their work. Trauma has become an important and influential paradigm for reading contemporary American literature. Too often, however, criticism has adopted narrow models of trauma, resulting in increasingly formulaic and clichéd interpretations. This study understands trauma on a wider basis than Freudian psychoanalysis, incorporating theories drawn from fields including narratology, in order to analyse devices characteristically employed by writers in order to represent and, often, to mimic the effects of trauma. The study also focuses on important issues often overlooked by conventional analyses of trauma, such as the characteristics and effects of perpetrator narratives. The book explores narrative devices and innovations, such as metafiction, as well as events in contemporary America, including 9/11, the Iraq War, and reactions to the Bush administration. American authors discussed in depth include Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Toni Morrison, Tim O’Brien, Lorrie Moore, Mark Danielewski, Art Spiegelman, Jonathan Safran Foer, Anthony Swofford, Joel Tunipseed, Evan Wright, Kayla Williams, Paul Auster, Philip Roth, and Michael Chabon. Contemporary American Trauma Narratives offers a timely and dissenting intervention into debates about American writers’ depiction of trauma and its consequences.Less

Contemporary American Trauma Narratives

Alan Gibbs

Published in print: 2014-07-30

This book examines the way American writers present the effects of trauma in their work. Trauma has become an important and influential paradigm for reading contemporary American literature. Too often, however, criticism has adopted narrow models of trauma, resulting in increasingly formulaic and clichéd interpretations. This study understands trauma on a wider basis than Freudian psychoanalysis, incorporating theories drawn from fields including narratology, in order to analyse devices characteristically employed by writers in order to represent and, often, to mimic the effects of trauma. The study also focuses on important issues often overlooked by conventional analyses of trauma, such as the characteristics and effects of perpetrator narratives. The book explores narrative devices and innovations, such as metafiction, as well as events in contemporary America, including 9/11, the Iraq War, and reactions to the Bush administration. American authors discussed in depth include Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Toni Morrison, Tim O’Brien, Lorrie Moore, Mark Danielewski, Art Spiegelman, Jonathan Safran Foer, Anthony Swofford, Joel Tunipseed, Evan Wright, Kayla Williams, Paul Auster, Philip Roth, and Michael Chabon. Contemporary American Trauma Narratives offers a timely and dissenting intervention into debates about American writers’ depiction of trauma and its consequences.

This is the first study devoted to Sylvia Plath's fiction. Plath wrote fiction throughout her life, in a wide variety of genres, including women's magazine romances, New Yorker stories, comedy, ...
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This is the first study devoted to Sylvia Plath's fiction. Plath wrote fiction throughout her life, in a wide variety of genres, including women's magazine romances, New Yorker stories, comedy, social criticism, autobiography, teenage fiction and science fiction. She wrote novels before and after The Bell Jar. Most criticism, however, still focuses on her poetry, neglecting this large and significant body of her work. Many of her short stories have never been discussed before. Discussing all her novels and stories, and based on research in the three major archives of her work, this book is the complete study of Plath's fiction. The author analyses her influences as a fiction writer, the relationships between her poetry and fiction, the political views she expresses in her fiction, and devotes two chapters to the central concern of her novels and stories, the roles of women in contemporary society. In each case, Plath's work is set in the cultural context of the discourses and practices of the American 1950s.Less

Sylvia Plath's Fiction : A Critical Study

Luke Ferretter

Published in print: 2010-07-06

This is the first study devoted to Sylvia Plath's fiction. Plath wrote fiction throughout her life, in a wide variety of genres, including women's magazine romances, New Yorker stories, comedy, social criticism, autobiography, teenage fiction and science fiction. She wrote novels before and after The Bell Jar. Most criticism, however, still focuses on her poetry, neglecting this large and significant body of her work. Many of her short stories have never been discussed before. Discussing all her novels and stories, and based on research in the three major archives of her work, this book is the complete study of Plath's fiction. The author analyses her influences as a fiction writer, the relationships between her poetry and fiction, the political views she expresses in her fiction, and devotes two chapters to the central concern of her novels and stories, the roles of women in contemporary society. In each case, Plath's work is set in the cultural context of the discourses and practices of the American 1950s.